Very good points, anon. I seem to recall some stats on Schwitzgebel’s blog: about half of the students at elite grad programmes come from elite undergrad programmes. I would add that people from non English-speaking countries interested in analytic philosophy are in a similar situation to the working class people you mention, at least in one respect: they usually have no-name BAs.

Thank you to people for posting. It’s really good to see those links and hear from other people dealing with this.

I think that there is a problem of authenticity in these cases too. Class is something you can hide. You can act in ways different from your background and maybe in the process you can even change your self conception. But should you? And does philosophy require you to if you want a future in the profession? I see a lot of people talking about learning how to pass off as having a different background than you do, and I feel the pressure to do so and usually try to. I can’t help feeling though that doing so is betraying the people with whom I most identify. Or tacitly acknowledging that its more desirable to be a person of one class than a person of another class..

I think that there are a lot of us in this boat. Unfortunately, so many people draw the problematic inference that one would only not go to a ‘top’ program because one couldn’t get in.

I have experienced this, but only with one foot in the grave, so to speak. I am second generation college and lived for a time in childhood truly poor, though by the time I left for college, my family was solidly middle class. Nonetheless, my grandparents are rural working class with all that accompanies it: hunting, low church evangelicalism, traditional gender norms, etc. These people are positively despised by most academics that I’ve encountered, and one is frequently invited to join in condemnation of them, albeit usually indirectly (condemn them via condemning gun-owners, for instance). Personally, I’d rather not spit on my family, and I’ve had to learn to grit my teeth.

Forgive me if this point has been made in response to Rachel above, but it strikes me that “straight white dudes” raising the question of class vis-a-vis other markers of exclusion is a problem only if class is not, in fact, the most basic and fundamental context within which exclusion should be addressed. I happen to think it is, and I am a white dude (though I wouldn’t characterize myself as ‘straight,’ not that I think it matters really). You can’t object to me that I am distracting you from discussing other contexts of exclusion without arguing why they are important to consider on their own and apart from class analysis. I frankly don’t give a shit if class politics means less discussion of identity politics, because I think that identity politics is nothing more than a badge that privileged liberals like to wear on their sweater. It has no actual purchase in a country in which less than one percent of the population owns more than fifty percent of the stocks, and where the oligarchs can’t decide whether they are more excited at the prospect of a Clinton or Bush presidency.

Claiming that Derek Parfit is working class because he was a ‘scholarship student’ at Eaton is ridiculous and suggests a lack of any real understanding of class and privilege in the British context. Both his parents were doctors and he was bought up and spent pretty much his whole life in Oxford. And attended the most elite school in the UK. It is just plain false that he was in any way working class. And the suggestion that he is show a lack of real understanding of class and class based prejudiced in the UK.

The intentional or unintentional misreading of my comments–and their discursive purpose–is amazing. Nowhere did I engage in oppression olympics. Nowhere did I say that ‘white dudes’ can’t raise class issues. Also ‘dudes’ has a specific extension (‘dudebro’). Men =/= dudes.

Rachel, I am not sure whether you think that I in particular misrepresented your comments. I do not think I did. But it’s important to be clear that there is a fundamental disagreement here. You do not think that class is the most important framework for addressing problems of discrimination and exclusion. I do. That means that we are not going to agree about what the most important issues to address in the profession are, and that even if we agree that an issue needs addressing, we will likely disagree about means. Because I am (some sort of) Marxist, I have no problem affirming that this is the case. My great frustration with leftists of your stripe is that they always end up being especially enlightened and self-consciously moral liberals. Identity politics is basically liberal politics. But I am opposed to liberal politics. So I *would* try to change our collective focus away from certain evils and toward others. I am only speaking for myself here, obviously. And I don’t mean to be unnecessarily confrontational, but it is important for me to be clear that our politics are incompatible. I think you’re wrong about the fundamentals, and you think I am wrong about the fundamentals. There’s no getting around that. (Sorry for the thread hijack. This will be my last comment.)

I looked at a page at Eton’s website, and it appears that they reserve the term “scholarship” for merit and “bursary” for need. So I now have reason to think that Derek Parfit should not have been included in the list above. Mea Culpa. In Parfit’s place perhaps you will allow Albert Camus, who said of his early years: “I lived in destitution but also in a kind of sensual delight ” (http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ca-Ch/Camus-Albert.html#ixzz3MJGEBKUh). I tried to find someone more contemporary, but was unsuccessful. I hope to see more comments like Alan’s!

Except that the great weight attached to references is precisely one the factors compounding the importance of pedigree. How likely is it that someone without pedigree will have influential letter-writers?

My socioeconomic background is complicated–the short version is that I grew up in a working class family (cab driver and nanny) in a crime-ridden urban neighborhood, but my family is now solidly middle class. My mother went to college while I was growing up. My father never finished high school. I also was very privileged in ways my peers were not–but I won’t get into details. Despite that relative privilege, I have struggled hugely with many of the things mentioned here. Though I am now in an elite department, I took a long circuitous route here. I worked 40 hours a week while getting my undergrad degree at a very non-elite institution and raising a young child. It took me a long time to conceptualize grad school as an option (same with college), and then I ended up transferring. Despite now being pedigreed, I know that this is largely a matter of luck and agree that we ought to think long and hard about the correlation between pedigree and socioeconomic status.

But the thing that I find the hardest in philosophy is just a lack of anyone who can relate to my experiences and life story. It is really isolating. And lonely. Even my closest friends in philosophy seem to think that I have had some crazy unusual life when I tell them about my experiences–they just don’t get that certain things are normal for lots of us. I’ve had three friends murdered in the past three years, countless people I know are in prison or dead. I have witnessed multiple shootings. I had to physically fight my way through middle school and high school. It is really hard to be in a situation where no one can understand these kinds of things (and where they are usually either joked about or coldly used as thought experiments in the classroom) but to also feel completely disconnected from one’s roots (my friends from home can no more understand what I am doing with my life and why than philosophers can understand where I come from, and my family is not much better in this respect). I still feel like a drifter who has disassociated from my past but who can’t find any sort of place in my present.

I also think that we really cannot overestimate how much class privilege influences people’s judgments about intelligence, capabilities, etc. I feel like my whole life is just watching rich kids get rewarded for knowing how to talk right and having gone to private schools their whole lives, over and over again. I think this is the thing to really focus on, and I think it intersects with gender and race issues.

Finally, I just want to emphasize a point already made here: philosophers are classist jerks. They think it is perfectly acceptable to make sweeping generalizations about things like: gun ownership when they have never seen a gun, eating fast food when they have no idea what it is like to be poor or working class, being from a rural and poor area, they have “white trash” dress up parties, they expect us to spend masses of money on food and drinks at places we feel incredibly uncomfortable in. Every time I go to a conference I hear at least one person casually insult my oldest friends or my family via sweeping and ignorant generalizations. My fellow graduate students and the faculty in my department do it too.

Rachel, go reread Justin C’s comment above. There’s no meaningful concept of “privilege” on which his story isn’t an account of lack of privilege.

I won’t take this bait. I will only say that you’re misunderstanding what ‘privilege’ refers to.

Just adding another story. I am the first in my extended family to earn a bachelors degree and a PhD. My father was out of work on disability (from many tours in Vietnam and then city police force injuries), and my mother worked night shifts on the janitorial staff at a local college so that I could get their employee tuition discount. I myself had no fewer than two jobs throughout my undergraduate career, and some years I would sleep in my car between classes and work shifts (including an overnight job at a hotel).

My first year in grad school, I received a $14.4k fellowship–that was the first year I didn’t have a job since high school, and also the first year my income exceeded the combined income from my parents. I lived frugally throughout grad school, teaching summer classes when I became eligible. I did not learn about wines, liquors, etc because I did not purchase them or attend tasting parties. To this day I confuse colored white wines with reds.

No one ever made me feel excluded because of my background, but then I imagine very few knew my background-attributing behaviors instead to a certain kind of Nerdiness.

I lucked into a tenure track job right out of my PhD, earned tenure a couple years ago. But I still feel odd, especially when people talk about their vacations, or when we decide upon restaurants for visiting speakers. (I rarely vacation with my family, and instead pay off loans or help people struggling in my biological family; and I don’t feel comfortable ordering food that costs more than $10/plate or so at a restaurant.) There are other differences too-e.g., choosing to live in a lower-income neighborhood both for my own comfort and because a rising tide lifts boats. But this post is long enough and my toddler is getting restless 🙂

Thanks for the thread, and thanks to others for sharing their stories.

@ Anonymous Thank you for saying this. We, in which I include me, who have a great deal of class privilege really need to reflect on our conduct and how it is insidiously integrated with “professional norms”:

“Finally, I just want to emphasize a point already made here: philosophers are classist jerks. They think it is perfectly acceptable to make sweeping generalizations about things like: gun ownership when they have never seen a gun, eating fast food when they have no idea what it is like to be poor or working class, being from a rural and poor area, they have “white trash” dress up parties, they expect us to spend masses of money on food and drinks at places we feel incredibly uncomfortable in. Every time I go to a conference I hear at least one person casually insult my oldest friends or my family via sweeping and ignorant generalizations. My fellow graduate students and the faculty in my department do it too.”

So, I wrote something that was too bitter. I am deleting it, and instead I’ll refer you all to Phil Och’s “Love me, Love me, Love me, I’m a Liberal.” I often sing it to myself after leaving departmental parties or dinners with speakers. You can listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u52Oz-54VYw

This is a great thread. I just wanted to add my story as well.

My parents have some postsecondary education, since they both went to Bible College. But growing up my family had very little money. We lived in one of the worst parts of our city. Our neighborhood was filled with a lot of fighting, alcoholism, etc. I remember seeing a lot of kids, 3-4 years old, wandering around in diapers, crying. My parents owned a house and a vehicle, but only because of the generosity of others; those things were basically given to our family. We almost always got our clothes second-hand. I remember being really excited when I was 10 years old and my parents bought me a brand new t-shirt. I had a few jobs to have spending money for myself. Some were awesome. Some were crappy. I have picked up a lot of used condoms.

I paid my own way through university, at first by slinging fast food. Then I lucked out with a job where I worked 26-30 hours a week doing really shitty, backbreaking work. I was happy with it, though, because I got paid a decent amount to live on and pay for school with. I’m now in a good grad program with a fellowship, which is great. I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do philosophy.

But so what. I worked hard, I had to put up with some shit, big deal. Many commenters above had it far worse. Plus I’ve been lucky in terms of gender and race.

What bothers me more deeply is the general higher-class attitude in informal and formal academic/philosophical settings. I think this doesn’t just refer to the amount of money your parents have. This refers to the sort of educational class they are in. People from a higher SE class just have this attitude or demeanor. There’s this certain way they talk, dress, and act, and you have to have that demeanor to be accepted. It’s like a mating call; people from middle-class, educated backgrounds can just recognize each other. I don’t know how to put on that demeanor, most of the time. I was raised to put on a very different kind of demeanor. I feel really out of place in formal philosophical contexts: e.g. when I’m giving a paper/presentation, or raising a question. I think people can probably read my SE status pretty well, so I feel a lot like I’m really faking it, and everybody can sense that, so we all know that I’m really faking it. So, what’s the fucking point. Other times I can luck out and fake the demeanor.

It’s also weird coming from a low-church evangelical background. I love my family. But so much of what you’re supposed to do in conversations with philosophers is shit on the kinds of people they are. You don’t just passingly complain about those kinds of people, you have to have long conversations where everybody really focuses the hate on them. And I don’t mean the theism here. I mean the hunting and the country music and the creationism and the climate-change denying and the republicanism. Yeah, sure, those things are bullshit (at least the last three things are), and we oughtta be complaining about it. But do we have to be so intense about hating the people who are wrapped up in it?

Three additional points: (1) I’ve known a couple other students in philosophy (grad and undergrad) from lower SE backgrounds. I’ve seen professors simply not take them seriously, even though they were really intelligent, and it’s clearly on account of their SE background. I’ve been lucky. (2) The amount of SE-awareness seems to vary greatly according to different graduate programs. (3) Obviously class issues don’t erase or minimize issues of race and gender in the profession. At all.

Rachel–I posted under my name because I thought maybe you would realize that I was well aware of the things that you are talking about, and that I don’t need to read a HuffPo article to learn about the basics of oppression and privilege, and hence that you didn’t need to talk to me in the same tone that you talk to the dudes you are talking to. However, earlier you denied that Justin C’s story was a story about a lack of privilege. Clearly both the links you posted and the comment you just posted are consistent with JC’s story being a story about a lack of privilege, even if JC is privileged in other ways. Just as when someone posts a story on the what it’s like blog, they are often stories about lack of privilege due to their being women–even if they are white women or rich women, those stories still ought to be taken seriously as stories about lack of privilege, and we shouldn’t automatically assume that they aren’t aware of other privilege and try to minimize the importance of what they are reporting by jumping on them for not explicitly acknowledging that privilege. You repeatedly came off in this thread as a person who was trying to derail discussions of class privilege by insisting that we instead talk about race or gender. I agree that these things are not separable and nor is the privilege or lack thereof that comes with them. But you need to make space for people to talk about an issue in our profession that is extremely salient for many of us and has previously received almost no attention. For me this issue has been much *more* pervasive and salient than the lack of privilege I’ve experienced due to being a woman, which often (but not always) manifests itself in much more subtle ways. There is systematic exclusion of people from poor and working class backgrounds to academia in general, and to philosophy specifically, and I find it immensely frustrating that people are being prevented from discussing that, and that the discussion is being derailed by what, in other contexts, would be considered totally unacceptably dismissive commentary.

Not to Rachel, just general comment: FWIW I am somewhat (but not completely) sympathetic to Ligurio’s point (despite some sinking suspicion that Ligurio is not someone I want to associate myself with). It is really hard to engage with people who are fundamentally committed to liberalism when one thinks that liberalism is unjust and horrible. This is especially true in philosophy, in my experience, where nearly every person is fundamentally committed to liberalism, and often in ways that make it simply impossible to have a conversation with them. This is why I have entirely avoided political philosophy and almost all of ethics. When people have starting assumptions that they take as axiomatic, fundamental, and unbreakable, and I think that those starting assumptions are radically incorrect, it is extremely hard to engage with them. But Ligurio is I hope aware that it is possible to be a feminist and a Marxist, and to care deeply about issues of race and gender and be a Marxist (I am not a Marxist, but it is at least closer to my views than the status quo is), and that one needn’t make things into a competition between what kinds of oppression trump others to hold radical, progressive anti-liberalist political views. I wanted to mention this because I am at least committed to the idea that without a total revolution overthrowing the current political system, none of the problems for any of us in academia are going to be fixed (except by band-aid solution, but I don’t consider that a fix). I am sure that part of why no one talks about class in philosophy is that to do so would either be to radically challenge the very structure of academia itself and everything providing its scaffolding, or to do something watered-down, hypocritical, and worse, but which I won’t describe here because I think it will offend too many people.

And perhaps I came off as “You repeatedly came off in this thread as a person who was trying to derail discussions of class privilege by insisting that we instead talk about race or gender” but my posts were decidedly not with that aim or content. I didn’t say we should supplant discussion of class privilege with discussions only of gender and race etc. I said that we shouldn’t supplant *those* discussions with only class privilege: we have to consider them all viz. intersectionality. However, I’ve noted that comments about intersectionality often get portrayed as wanting to derail and only talk about the other issues. I think that philosophy needs to talk about class issues more. My point was merely–and I’ve repeated this more than once in this thread–that in having those conversations, we should keep in mind the other axes. There are ways that, e.g., black people experience poverty that are importantly different from how white people experience poverty, and they’re not fully captured by ‘white privilege’ because of intersectionality.

Hearing everyone’s stories is like a weight being lifted off my shoulders. Thank you so much for sharing. It’s so helpful to know I’m not alone.

As another anon grad says above, the expectation that you have to “shit on the kinds of people” that you’re related to is particularly true of those of us who grew up in the south. I can’t count the number of times philosophers have said “the south” with utter disgust in my presence. Like Alan, I don’t extol the virtues of southern working class life: as a woman who was interested in books and not traditional gender roles, I often experienced it as a hostile place. But “those people” are my family and it’s insulting to listen to philosophers who I know have NEVER interacted with a working-class southerner talk about them like they’re not even human.

To Rachel’s point about different forms of privilege, yes absolutely! I hope no one in this comment thread would deny that being poor, white, and male grants you privilege that some others don’t have. I was just recently talking to another first-gen poor southern academic who said exactly this: he knew full well that a lot of his success came because he was white. I know the same thing is true of me. And by no means do I want to downplay that. But please hear these stories not as the (all too common) refrain “well, I’m marginalized too!” The shame, isolation, and fear is very real, and the fact that I’m reading stories from other philosophers like me is so healing, it’s bringing me to tears.

Michaela said: “…without a total revolution overthrowing the current political system, none of the problems for any of us in academia are going to be fixed (except by band-aid solution, but I don’t consider that a fix). I am sure that part of why no one talks about class in philosophy is that to do so would either be to radically challenge the very structure of academia itself and everything providing its scaffolding, or to do something watered-down, hypocritical, and worse, but which I won’t describe here because I think it will offend too many people.”

This is basically my own view.

Absolutely no one here has said this, and it’s absolutely not an inference one could reasonably draw from anything said so far in this thread.

I wasn’t at all asking you to defend anything. I wasn’t asking you also to discuss forms of privilege you have. People have read that into my comments. But it’s simply not there. The point of bringing up gender/race etc is that these *intersect* with class such that the way a white male experiences poverty will tend to be very different from how a black woman experiences it. This is *not* at all to deny that the white male still lacks economic privilege. He does! And let’s talk about that, because it matters! But let’s also not lose sight of how the other axes are directly relevant to conversations about class privilege (or lack thereof).

This has been a wonderful and important discussion. One of the great things about it is how it serves to bring to light a different dimension of discrimination, personal difficulty, and exclusion.

I am a member of a traditionally underrepresented group, and although I grew up in a middle-class household, there was no safety net, as one of my parents was a recent immigrant who came here with nothing. My parents managed to support me and my several siblings (all close in age), but there was no wealth being generated, no money saved for college, etc.

I attended a very mediocre public high school where only a third of the students went on to any kind of AA or BA degree, but was fortunate to get into a good school for college. Throughout college, I had to work 20+ hours in work-study jobs and take out heavy loans (these would now be grants, sigh…). This was all fine, and relatively manageable. What was much harder was when my siblings ran into trouble while I was in college and later graduate school, and that stress and anxiety came back to me. One of my siblings got in trouble for drug-related crime, and with only a relatively inattentive public defender helping, ended up with a felony conviction, and later spent significant time in jail for other offenses, all of which has dramatically curtailed his life options. Another sibling has had various drug and mental health issues and spent time homeless and involuntarily committed off the street into relatively terrifying state mental health institutions. Another sibling ran into significant financial trouble. All of them have been on food stamps and various other forms of state assistance.

I mention this here because these are all the kinds of problems that people with more money would have been able to address in very different ways, and much less would have fallen on me, the one person in my family with various kinds of skills and relatively basic knowledge of these things. I have spent countless hours on the phone and in person with my family and with various state agencies, trying to help solve and address and cope with these problems and their significant effects. While an undergraduate I strained relationships with some professors by having to reschedule meetings and deadlines, and I never felt comfortable explaining the personal reasons that required this rescheduling. While in graduate school, I was the primary person in my family responsible for helping with my siblings due to geography and money, and I felt a great deal of stress, guilt, frustration, and anxiety. It was a great relief to talk to one of my advisors at one particularly difficult point, although it was hard to do so, and I think there is still a great deal of stigma attached to even having family members dealing with these problems, so that I was reluctant to say anything. I repeatedly questioned my choices regarding being in graduate school and staying in graduate school, rather than getting a job that would pay more so that I could help my family.

One thing it made me think about, and which I continue to think about now that I am a professor, is how little professors know about what their students are going through or dealing with. It has made me try to be more understanding of students as people with a lot else that might be going on. Sadly, I think these kinds of stories are not particularly uncommon for children of middle-class families or working-class families. It’s a fine line between modest success and disaster. That’s where I feel this kind of thread is particularly useful, in a way similar to the various “what it’s like” blogs. It lowers a certain kind of epistemic barrier and, I hope, will make people more sensitive to what they do and say and assume.

Justin C., the answer to your question is simple. It is because identity politics is now the default framework for the Left’s conceptualization of oppression, with the result that “class” becomes a kind of identity that must be made commensurate with other “identities,” such as being white, or black, or queer, a man, a woman, a transgendered person, and so on. (Drabek has helpfully suggested above why class is importantly different from these other things. His thoughts are worth pursuing.) The demand that we treat class as commensurate with these other things leads people into untenable positions. Such as the position that some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet who happen to be women or black or gay or queer or whatever, lack, by virtue of these identities alone, the privileges that come with being white and male. If one were to admit that there is no meaningful sense in which these people can be said to lack privilege (given actual existent reality), then one would come to see that, while different forms of oppression *are* intersectional, class is fundamentally different and more basic than the rest. Not seeing this is the very essence and–I am sometimes tempted to think–the very point of identity politics within the neoliberal economic-political order.

Ligurio’s 2:32 comment makes a similar point to the one I was about to make, namely that this thread demonstrates that the concept of “privilege” and the concept of “traditionally underrepresented groups” don’t track each other evenly. African-Americans are most definitely a traditionally underrepresented group, but it wouldn’t follow from that that Cornell West’s or Colin Powell’s kids would “lack privilege” in the higher ed pursuits; whereas white males are clearly not a traditionally underrepresented group, yet the suggestion that Justin C and the several others from similar circumstances who have posted here are privileged is obtuse. As Ligurio suggests, part of the problem is in the essentializing reductivism that attaches to the collectivizing impulse. Might be better to take people as they come, their invidual circumstances being a factor of many different things – which is obscured by the idea that some ascriptive group membership defines them.

I don’t typically post to forums like this, and I especially don’t tend to engage in public autobiography, but I regard the topic of this discussion as so important, both to academia at large and to myself as an individual, that I’m breaking my rule on this occasion.

We’ve heard in these threads from many who suffered the trials and humiliations of class discrimination, both intentional and unintentional, within academic philosophy grad programs, but persevered and went forward to become professors and full members of the profession. These stories have been inspiring and therapeutic; it is incredibly edifying to know that my experience was not mine alone, but shared by many others. I want to briefly sketch a different story however, one that did not end in a career in academia.

I grew up poverty class in a small, rural southern town with few jobs and no culture of higher education to speak of. High school graduation rates were low; many of my classmates were expected to leave school as soon as legally possible to help out with the family farm or find a low paying service job to help support their siblings. I did the latter, but I knew that this was not the place or environment where I wanted to raise my children or ultimately to plant my headstone. So, for fifteen years I set money aside from every paycheck until I had enough of a security net to quit my job and apply full-time at a small university a few towns over. Even then, I ended up taking out loans, which I am still paying off. To help make ends meet I took full time staff positions at the university, while maintaining a full course load in philosophy. I never once felt discriminated against on the basis of class during my undergrad career. If my classmates and professors weren’t themselves from my socioeconomic background, then they had friends and family who were. Eventually, I graduated summa cum laude and began applying to grad schools as far away from the south as possible.

I was immediately accepted into the MA program at a major research university – one with a strong reputation for progressive social justice activism – and for the first time in my life I realized what class discrimination looked like from the inside. I don’t have a noticeable accent, so people would openly joke about the south and the ignorant, gun-owning, poor white trash who spawned there in front of me, and I would grit my teeth and feign a smile. When I did tell people where I was from, they would express sympathy that I had to grow up around ‘those kind of people,’ and how great it was that I got away from them. My friends, my parents, weren’t people to my colleagues. They were less than human, a punchline at best. In the few occasions that I attempted to protest this position publically, I was immediately shut down. I was informed that my relatives and closest friends, who still lived in abject poverty and struggled daily to meet the needs of basic survival, were, by virtue of their race, gender, religion, and/or political affiliation, de facto members of a privileged class. Without a hearing, they were judged racists, hate-mongers, oppressors, the Enemy.

This period of my life was marked by extreme depression and anxiety. A tremendous amount of psychic real estate was given over to parsing the extreme disconnect I felt between my background and upbringing and the society I now found myself in. Finally, I completed my MA, severed my ties with academia, and embarked upon the course that eventually led to my becoming a union organizer. I now advocate specifically on behalf of the underprivileged and the working class, and I find that I can once more lay head to pillow without feeling like I’m betraying by association the people who sacrificed so much for me in my lifetime.

I want to thank everyone who has contributed to this thread, which has on the whole strengthened my appreciation for the philosophical community as a whole. I do however want to point out that there has been a string of comments here, by one prominent philosopher in particular, that have re-opened those long-dormant scars and I think provide a sadly concrete example of the dismissal of the actual struggle of the poverty and working classes by certain academics who identify with contemporary social justice movements. The general tone, comments, and attempts to redirect this important discussion away from the plight of the poor in academia and toward her own particular hobby-horses demonstrate, I believe, why academics in particular and the left in general have immense difficulty connecting with the working poor, a problem that gets translated into electoral defeats that paradoxically worsen the plight of those very disadvantaged citizens. This kind of talk only serves to alienate the poverty and working classes. It wins no hearts and minds, and serves only to preach to the already-convinced among the choir.

I imagine the issue of how class relates to the various axes of oppression is an issue we’re not going to make a lot of progress on there. That said, it’s worth following up to Ligurio’s post to note that there are a lot of ways to proceed. For instance, though I think class is probably fundamentally different from race, gender, et al., it doesn’t follow that it’s more *basic* than race, gender, et al (nor does it follow that it’s *not* more basic, so I don’t want to say that Ligurio’s view is somehow obviously wrong). The issue of which type of oppression is more basic was pretty hot 30-50 years ago, but I think that debate is tired and I haven’t seen anything worthwhile written on the topic in my lifetime. For whatever it’s worth, my own impression is that class is different from race and gender in such a way that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to draw comparisons or even ask which one is more basic (and I also think this realization is why the debate has petered out).

I so appreciate this conversation and other peoples experiences really resonate with my own. I grew up regularly standing on line (is that a Brooklyn thing – do most people say “in line?”) for government cheese with my mother, My five siblings and I went to the American Legion hall for Christmas presents, and the free dental clinic at the NYC Board of Health was where we had our cavities filled. In fact my teeth were so jacked up that when I got my tenure track teaching job – I was mortified to go to a real dentist for the first time as an adult (and a professor! I had to write that on the form) and explain the state of my crooked poorly maintained teeth. However I also realized – specifically at the Board of Health – that because my mother and all of her kids were white we got to skip ahead of the Puerto Rican and Black kids who took a number in the waiting room. The white working class receptionist ushered us in. This is to Rachel’s point about intersectionality. I did get to pass particularly as my neighborhood became gentrified and I benefitted tremendously from studying the language and the bookcases and the food of the families that I babysat for – young “pioneers” as they were called who were buying the brownstones that were formerly rooming houses and renovating them in upscale 80s fashion. I never saw the NY Times outside of a newsstand until I began babysitting. It was strictly the Daily News in our house. One of the babysitting mothers, a Wellsley grad, helped me to write my grad application letter. Both of my parents grew up in the neighborhood (though not in Brownstones but apartments over stores). Now no one in my family including me who is the first and only person to finish college (and then earn a Ph.D) could ever afford our neighborhood. Having NYC and CUNY in particular as resources while I was growing up made it possible for me to go from Brooklyn College to CUNY to my current tenured position in the midwest. I recognize that if I grew up in a rural community I would have had far less access to resources and most likely not have the reduced tuition that CUNY offered. While my race, sexual orientation, my parent’s relatively stable marriage, and NYC’s resources helped me I still know how deeply my roots are in the poor and working class (given our families erratic income we were sometimes living in poverty and sometimes working class). It took me a long time to even admit my story and how poor we really were (6 kids, 2 adults in 5 rooms with everything pulling out into a bed “except the toilet” as my father used to say) to other academics but with age (and tenure) I feel less vulnerable to unfair judgment. There have certainly been other issues in the academy that I have had to contend with but I am particularly dedicated to the branch campus where I teach because so many of my students are like me – bright sons and daughters of poor and immigrant families with very few resources. Seeing the success of some of these students over the years has been one of the best parts of my job. I never hesitated sharing my story with them. I appreciate the encouragement from younger faculty here for us who are more senior to “come out” about our class history. Thank you for the contributions others have made to this discussion.

It is easy to get the impression from the 70+ comments here that philosophers are oblivious to socioeconomic issues and that the profession is a hostile place for the non-elite. So as not to leave the uninitiated who happen to be reading this thread wholly with this impression, I’ll just mention that I would not be as far along into our profession as I am now had it not been for a good number of philosophers who were deeply empathetic about my situation. I’ll spare everyone my sob story, but I will say that when I eventually got myself into college, I had professors who helped out at every step of the way. From mentioning that I didn’t have enough money to take the GREs more than once in my graduate school letters of recommendations to even offsetting the costs of graduate school applications, it was my philosophy professors who, more than anyone else, understood my financial plight and contributed toward alleviating it.

In response to one of Aaron W’s comments, I would suggest that there are all kinds of signs by which people of a higher socio-economic class recognize that others do or do not belong to their own group. Language usage — slang, idioms, grammatical constructions, accent, intonation and other matters of pronunciation — is a big part of it, but there are others.

And of course language usage does not always signal any difference in educational attainment, but people who don’t know much about language or are not very worldly, yet are bourgeois, will think it does. I have seen people in philosophy made fun of for their accents where the differences were a function of regional differences not class differences, yet where it was clear that all the parties concerned believed that class was at issue.

I like that Aaron spoke of the educational attainment of “households”. The language of an educated person can contain vestiges of the language and culture of an uneducated household; and similarly a middle class (in terms of income) household may be formed by people who are from families who have been impoverished for generations. Poverty leaves its marks even when people have been out of poverty for a generation.

Often people of a higher socio-economic class won’t experience their own reactions to someone of a different socio-economic class as judgments that the other ‘belongs’ or does not belong; rather, they will experience their reactions as judgements that the other person is being odd or unusual or graceless. Too often our ego-centric predicament does not occur to us. The judgmental nature of philosophy so encourages us to forget the self-reflective part of it.

Oh God, the teeth! I had forgotten about that. I have enough money now that I could probably get the crookedness and chips fixed, but I’ve decided to embrace the wonkiness.

anon 12/19,

You say “racial underrepresentation in the U.S. is not mainly a function of … socioeconomic status” but that it is a foundational feature of the U.S.

It is certainly a foundational feature of the US, but that does not mean that it is not sustained for economic reasons, nor that it did not come about in the first place for economic reasons. Yes, at the level of the individual actor, it’s racism (=fear, hate, ignorance, ego-centricity). But I don’t think the racist structure that philosophy so enthusiastically participates in (while all the time shaking its head, tearing at its hair and asking itself how can this be, how can this be?) is entirely explained by the conscious intentions of individual actors.

But that’s a whole big discussion about individualism vs. ‘holism’ in the explanation of social structures I guess.

Anon 12/19,

It seems to me that your last claim depends on what you mean by “generally.” For any individual selected at random, is racial privilege (or lack thereof) a function of socio-economic status? No. But is the obvious racial privilege enjoyed by white people in the U. S. taken as a whole a function of the relative socio-economic status of whites compared to blacks? If it were *not* so, then a fair and just redistribution of wealth proportional to their relative population sizes need not have any bearing on racial privilege. But I think this is pretty obviously false. Suppose that blacks as a group miraculously came to possess a level of economic power comparable to whites. What force does racial privilege have left to exert in this scenario? Certainly many whites would still be prejudiced against blacks, but who cares? Being joked about and excluded from boring dinner parties (as happens today in many communities to Asians, Jews, and Muslims) is much better than serving as the politically and economically powerless scapegoat of a domestic police state. But maybe I am misunderstanding your point. I enjoyed your comment. Thanks.

I could read here stories about people from the working class or from “the south”. Mine is quite different but still about being poor. My story might help with diversity, I think. I come from a country so small and so poor that people do not have a cliche about it. So, I guess, I am spared from hearing offensive comments. But the problem is not less painful. I am a grad student at an important US university, but god forbid you would ever complain about money. I can see it in everyone’s eyes: it is bad taste; what are you doing here? is it not irresponsible of you to study philosophy when you are so poor? The supposition is, of course, philosophy is for people who can afford it. Especially professors feel offended when you speak about it. They become suspicious that you want something from them; more money, for example. You become a pain in the butt. Probably most of them do not know that those of us that come with a student visa are not allowed to work and cannot take a loan. We cannot leave the academia and just find a job (I do not know if these are “privileges”, but oh boy, do I envy people who can do that!). We have to make it or we are more or less metaphorically speaking, dead.

I’m a Latino and son of an immigrant from the poorest country in South America. My dad was fairly privileged there but when he immigrated to the USA he came with $500 and no college degree. My mom is the daughter of a baker and a grocery store checker in Chicago. My dad didn’t want us to learn Spanish because we were Americans now, so we spoke English at home, but all his extended family spoke Spanish when together so I learned it anyway (with supplemental help from good Spanish teachers in school later). We moved around when I was young. When I was thirteen my dad got fired from a job because his racist boss hated Latinos and as a result we moved to yet another state. We never had much money, but my parents had credit cards. They’d pay off the debts finally in the 90s. But I was precocious and inward and school came easily. I didn’t know what college was until I was a senior in high school, though; I had good teachers in my public schools who figured out that this valedictorian was clueless about higher education in America and directed me to a fine liberal arts college that would pay my way (my parents said they’d try to help a little with a public university, but I took the full ride). I was the first member of my extended family to go to college. All my friends there had at least one parent with an MD, JD, or PhD. I did well enough, but again I was a clueless senior and didn’t know what grad school was; but I asked my profs how to be able to do what they did, because it seemed so fun, and they helped me out; and I got into an excellent doctoral program. I had expected just to get a regular job but grad school seemed like a scam worth taking: you pay me to take classes? Now I’m a tenured faculty member at a top public research university, and my parents still ask me when I’m going to get a real job. They haven’t understood my work since it was homework in eighth grade. It gets lonely. I feel it the most strongly at APAs, at rich person hotels that cost a week’s groceries a night; and I just want to talk shop; can’t we just meet on a campus? I didn’t get into this for luxury. I have a family now and I gravitate more and more away from America, where they look down on my people; where faculty act like the rich people they are and fight to get paid more and more and more while they pledge to combat inequality; where colleagues sneer at the religiosity of my family (as others here have reiterated). It gets lonely. But I have done so well: I write from a research fellowship in the south of France, living a life I could only read about as a child. My children will know a different life, because I have learned to wear the mask, have learned to talk with the masters, to hold my own. It is a wonderful grace but it’s very hard to relate to colleagues who’ve walked such different paths; and it gets lonely. We who’ve lived differently should stand together.

It seems that some people would like to hear from people like me. So here goes. I was the first person in my family to go to college, and I’m from a blue collar family. My father is a retired mailman. He tended bar at night to make ends meet. My mother worked just as hard taking care of five kids. My first job was at a lovely, elite liberal arts college, Davidson College. I have to admit that I felt out of place there for a while. I wrote it off to “culture shock.” I grew up in and around Detroit (a city of 1.8 million people then), and Davidson College is in a very small southern town. Anyway, I came to love the place. Probably, about half way through that job of 21 years, an older friend of mine who also works in the philosophy of action told me that he and I would never end up at classy universities because we were so clearly blue collar guys and people who teach at classy universities like to hire classy people like themselves. I knew that there was something to this, because I knew that people tend to feel more comfortable when associating with people like themselves. But I have to say that it didn’t bother me much personally. For one thing, I’ve never cared about having prestige by association (with a given group of any kind). Also, I like to think I’m guided solely by quality-of-life considerations in making decisions about where to work (and prestige by association isn’t one of them for me). I should add that my friend was exaggerating, of course. There are philosophers from working class backgrounds at classy universities.

I have a lot of friends in philosophy. Many of them are from blue collar families and are doing very well. My advice to young people in philosophy with blue collar backgrounds who sometimes feel a bit at sea is to be yourself and work hard at what you love. I don’t want to minimize the problems that you encounter, but I do want to offer encouragement. I feel very fortunate to have a career in philosophy. It’s wonderful to make your living doing what you love.

Thanks for this thread, Justin, and for others for sharing stories. Just sharing mine too.

I’m a first generation college student from a non-English-speaking country. My father started as a tractor driver and gradually progressed to a supervisor position in the same company. I remember helping my father write memos when he was progressing in his job, because he couldn’t put a proper sentence together in writing. His schooling was four years of doing things like digging crab pools for his teacher. My mother was unemployed for much of my youth, but worked occasional jobs in child care, as a secretary, and as a cleaner. I remember my mother often having only the equivalent of roughly $20-30 in today’s US money (adjusted for cost) to figure out meals for the week for a family of 5. Don’t know how she did it sometimes. I worked every school holiday since I was 13, doing things like cutting grass, picking up trash, and emptying dog poop bins from local dog parks. Truly disgusting. I wore hand-me-down clothes or clothes that my mother made until I could buy more “fashionable” items with my own money. (Not that I had great taste.) I ended up in college in part because I was always studious and good at schoolwork, and in part through a series of accidents. I took student loans and received some government aid from my country. Without that I doubt I could have gone to college at all. And I doubt I could have gone to college in the US, given the high tuition costs. I still had to work a few different jobs through my undergrad studies to make ends meet. I’m constantly conscious of how easily things could have been very different for me. I often look at service industry workers and imagine myself in their place, feeling the sore legs and feet, and thinking about how much of the shift is left.

So many of the previous commenters’ experiences ring true for me, both the good and the bad. I too couldn’t believe that I could get paid to study philosophy in graduate school, and felt rich when I started receiving a $14,000 stipend / TA pay. I appreciate the real difficulties that those with families or illnesses can have making ends meet on a graduate stipend or TA pay. But for someone like me who had no family and was relatively healthy, this was the first time I didn’t have to count every penny. I even had enough money to visit my home country regularly. Imagine how rich I feel now that I have a job. (And yes, the free books! Now that I have oodles of money to buy them.) I would just mention that I’m particularly grateful to an undergraduate teacher who cared enough to tell me about the existence of graduate school in the US, and encouraged me to apply. I was so lucky that he was there. I otherwise completely lacked the cultural capital to even envisage the possibility of the path that I ended up taking.

Although I’m overall very lucky and happy in the profession, I do also share some of the feelings of faking it with cultural references. In my case, I also feel the expectation to have upper-middle class tastes being compounded with the expectation to be knowledgeable of all kinds of Anglophone cultural and historical reference points that I didn’t grow up with and wasn’t taught about in school. I can’t imagine the tables turned with respect to what’s expected of whom here, or what sort of ignorance is acceptable or not judged (unintentionally) to be a mark against your intelligence. I’m not asking for anyone to change their own cultural reference points. But it would be great to be a bit more conscious of what sorts of tacit expectations are often imposed on people in professional-social contexts, regarding what tastes or knowledge intelligent people have in common. I often also feel a bit alienated from my family back in my home country. They have always been supportive, but I can’t convey to them what I do or what my life is now like. It’s a weird middle place to be.

I’m a white woman. I recognize that being white has helped me throughout my life. This discussion had made me realize that I don’t usually feel my gender in professional-social contexts nearly as pointedly as I feel my class and cultural difference. Not to minimize the existence of gender norms or biases.

You and me both, sister. In my own case, I work at the college in my small, Midwestern hometown (where I’m currently helping to raise the fifth generation of my family) and feel as if I have to smile and nod when senior colleagues (fortunately, none in my own department)–and especially those who go the most out of their way to present themselves as enlightened about social justice and committed to inclusivity–shit all over it and the people who live in it.

It’s good to know we’re not alone.

A MacAskill — I’d point out that your “Absolute Poverty” is defined in relative terms.

I come from a working class background–my father is a factory worker/skilled laborer and my mother was a stay at home parent for most of my childhood–and was a first generation college student. Some of the stories on this thread are familiar and some not so much. Yes we shopped at thrift stores and yard sales and yes there was a lot of anxiety about money and a lot of energy going into planning economically to avoid tragic outcomes should something unexpected happen. But food insecurity, lack of stable housing, etc. were thankfully not part of my childhood. (Maybe in some way that means my class background is not the kind intended to be picked out by the thread? I’m not sure.) College, though, was not considered a given for me–in fact the expected path when I was young was essentially to get married, make babies, and be a stay at home mom. It was only because I was exceptionally academically oriented from a very young age that the idea of higher education began to enter my parent’s radar. I remember distinctly in 8th grade class rankings were done in my middle school (a decent–not great but not awful school academically) of about 500 students and I was in the top 1% or so. My mother started crying and said ‘you really are going to go to college aren’t you?’ Though I had been talking about college for years, it became clear to me then that my parents had possibly been somewhat humoring me in going along with such talk. I was very lucky though that while my parents knew absolutely nothing about four year colleges, financial aid, etc. were willing to learn with me. Also I would say my parents financial security improved through my childhood so that at least in terms of steady income by the time I was of high school age things were less financially strapped. So my parents were able to help with college financially. And thankfully I earned a very significant merit scholarship to a prestigious liberal arts college that was in the very same town in which I had grown up. This made my education extremely affordable such that I amazingly graduated from college with no student loans debt whatsoever (part of the scholarship was that the college covered the part of financial aid that normally takes the form of loans with grant money.) Having no student loan debt leaving undergrad made the decision to go to pursue a Ph.D. (and thus not have a job providing a real salary for 6 years much easier). Even better, in my last year of undergrad I won a Javits fellowship that covered 4 years of graduate school with a higher stipend than offered at the university which I completed my Ph.D. and thus cut down on the need to accept TA positions for tuition, stipend, and healthcare. This is all to say, I was VERY VERY VERY VERY lucky.

Much of the impostor syndrome type concerns some expressed above or the just feeling like one doesn’t fit in, then, are familiar to me. But being lgbtq and a woman as well as first generation, it can be hard to sort out where class is behind those issues for me and where the other identities are. I would say that in some ways going to the liberal arts college I went to was more of a socioeconomic class shock, and so more of a constant reminder of my difference than anything that has come since as it was an extremely wealthy institution (more so than any I have attended or worked at since) and students seemed to by and large come from very well-off backgrounds. I actually found that the noticeability of my own discomfort or impostor syndrome or lack of seeming to fit in decreased significantly by the time I entered graduate school. I often felt, actually, that since most other grad students were at that point living on their own, financially independent from their parents certain kinds of class differences that were very obvious in college became more difficult to see. Certainly some differences in cultural capital were still there (and are still there for me today) even as I have a tenure-track position and my wife (from a somewhat similar class background) has a well-paying professional career and thus we are now on the very opposite end of the class spectrum in terms of income and career. I suspect there are three main reasons why, for me, class plays a somewhat less significant role in my own story or in what made my path in academia difficult: 1) because within the group of the working-class I had a number of privileges to begin with (e.g. relatives in more solidly middle-class positions and income levels), lived in a small city in which the wealthier and poorer areas fed into the same decent secondary schools, was lucky to have relative financial stability in my childhood, etc., 2) because I got so very lucky in the ways I mentioned above (various scholarships/fellowships that made affording education amazingly easier), and 3) because the other aspects of my identity have really been much more salient such that even if my class background mattered a good deal (which I believe it did), sex/gender and sexuality have mattered MUCH more.

Given #3 and for other reasons, then, while I’ve always been quite sympathetic to Marxist thinking, some of the discussion above suggesting that class is the most fundamental oppression, that other kinds of oppressions would disappear if only class oppression were undone, etc. does not fit well with my own experience at all. Liguro asked above, for instance, if blacks and whites had similar economic situations what would be left of white privilege and wouldn’t blacks then be more like Asians, Jews, or Muslims. Three thoughts jumped immediately to mind in reading that: 1) I can’t see how given the recent report on the CIA torturing terror suspects–numerous of them apparently innocent and wrongfully held in the first place–the one could seriously suggest that the main disadvantage to being Muslim in the U.S. today is not being invited to upper-class dinner parties (and in the case of Asians it would seem to ignore the significant negative consequences that bias can have even on a group that does not suffer significant economic deprivation), 2) more seriously I don’t know, in imagining a more comparable wealth/income situation for blacks and whites how to think about that coming about and I think that would matter a great deal in what it means for racial privilege/disadvantage. For instance, if tomorrow suddenly wealth/income were evenly distributed amongst the races would that reverse the biases and psychological effects that studies find that lead people to believe black children are older than they actually are, to be more likely to falsely believe in a split-second observation that a black person vs. a white person is holding a gun rather than a non-threatening object, etc. and would differential police force used against blacks and whites then be reversed as well?). 3) How does the view that socioeconomic class is the most fundamental oppression and undoing it will make sense of anti-lgbq, anti-trans, and misogynistic oppression? White middle-class lgbqt people, for instance, are still vulnerable to anti-lgbtq violence despite their socioeconomic status even though surely those with less socioeconomic status are even more vulnerable. Similarly, the refusal of the law to recognize lgbq families (or to do so only in exchange for large amounts of $, e.g. in the case of second-parent adoption) is most harmful to lower income and impoverished lgbq people; yet it is surely still extremely harmful even to well-off lgbq people to. For instance, in most states which do not allow second-parent adoption and/or same-sex marriage one parent in a same-sex couple will have no legal rights to the children of the couple and no amount of $ can buy legal parental status should the biological parent of the children decide to cut off all contact forever between the minor children and the other parent. Finally with regard to sex/gender, how does sexual violence against women (which again is still quite harmful to otherwise privileged women even if it burdens the worst off women socioeconomically the most) directly tie to class oppression?

Perhaps the thought regarding sex/gender, sexuality, and gender identity is something more about the origin of those categories and the oppression based on them in the first place–that it is a direct result of capitalism and the need to control workers, to focus resentments of working class people, etc. at some despised group rather than at capitalist system itself that these oppressions emerged in the first place? I don’t doubt that capitalism was likely *part* of the story of these oppressions, but it strikes me as very unlikely that capitalism could be *most* of the story. And thus when imagining these post-revolution situations in which we imagine what is left of various kinds of oppressions it doesn’t seem at all obvious that sex/gender oppression, sexuality oppression, and gender identity oppression would have largely disappeared.

It’s funny, in the UK departments I’ve been familiar with, it seems everyone is scrambling to sound as blue collar as they can, though many of them come from privileged backgrounds. Solidarity seems to involve talking about your working class grandparents and never wearing anything nicer than jeans and a sweater.

Participating in this game is doubly ironic for me, as I actually do come from a poor background and have had to learn to ‘fit in’ with privileged peers, only to have to reign that in when I’m with privileged-but-Marxist philosophers. Add to that the acting that necessarily accompanies being a woman in a male-dominated field, (and an American in the UK to boot) and you have one very elaborate farce.

My own way of adjusting has been to appreciate the comedy of it all and feel lucky I’ve got this far. That said, I think people from diverse backgrounds have a hell of a lot to offer philosophy and should use their difference to challenge the assumptions of the discipline and of their colleagues.

Sorry to post this as anonymous but I don’t think my identity matters to this observation. Over the past few months I have seen philosophers trashed for their supposedly “privileged” backgrounds because they attended elite undergraduate institutions. So did I, only because I had the help of scholarships I won, an enormous student loan, a lucrative full-time job over the summer, and 15 hours a week of campus job (the most we were allowed to have). My background was in not financially privileged, but I was privileged to have the benefit of things like parents who read to me and took me to the library all the time. One thing people can do to improve the situation is to stop criticizing everyone who goes to an elite college as if they were some kind of silver-spoon pampered pets. It’s tiresome.

I can identify with many of the comments here. My (lower) mid-class, divorced parents cut me off and kicked me out at 17. 10 years later I finished my BA while working lots of jobs and living close to the bone. I had $14,000 in student loan debt that I thought was impossibly crazy,….until I went to grad school out-of-state, unfunded at first, in an expensive city. 12 years out of grad school, I am a tenured professor who has yet to make a dent in my 100k debt. My colleagues travel, have nannies and house cleaning services, and buy new cars; I make loan payments and save aggressively for my kid’s college so history does not repeat itself. I could save more, buy less, donate more….

I will mention a great book of the subject of folks from working class families “crossing over” to white collar fields: Lubrano, Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams. http://www.amazon.com/Limbo-Blue-Collar-Roots-White-Collar-Dreams/dp/0471714399

112– seriously. I too went to one of those ‘elite’ colleges (seeing it then, as I still do to some extent now, as my only chance ‘out’ of a life I didn’t want to have). The fact that that bit of my history is basically public knowledge only exacerbates the tendency people have to make all the presumptions of which folks have spoken on this and the other thread. Actual facts? I went to undergrad as an emancipated minor, worked full time (40 plus hours a week) to get through because elite college did not in those days know what to do in terms of financial aid with an emancipated minor, and took out enormous loans (the Federal government, otoh, recognized the legal category to which I belonged, so there’s that). Now tenured, I still have massive student loans — I will be past retirement age when they are paid off.

My parents never visited university and I grew up under rather poor circumstances. Currently I am a post doc, and I feel that I am the only one from a non-academic social background in my field. I feel very sorry that the UPdirectory did not include the category. Compared to the other two minorities to which I belong, female and LGBTQ, I always felt that the social background has much more adverse influences. I hope that the issue of social background will get more attention in the community. Thanks a lot for bringing some attention to the matter.